Internet is a global network that enables users to e.g. browse WWW-sites (World Wide Web, later “web”), send and receive emails and communicate with other users e.g. by instant messaging. When a user browses web-sites (s)he may find content that (s)he wishes to share with a friend group or a community (s)he belongs to. One method for sharing content is to bookmark the web-site into a social bookmarking service. However, in order to look at the bookmark, other users need to be notified by an email, an instant message or similar existing system to go to the bookmark site. After the user has found the bookmark, (s)he has to click it for accessing the actual content. Another method for sharing content is to send a link to the web content via email, which clutters the mail box and again requires the user to click the link in order to see the desired content. Discussion on the content via email is neither practical.
Currently users' emails are polluted with these links and often users wouldn't like to receive them, even though they were interested in the content itself.
Similar situation occurs e.g. with web based social communities like Facebook© comprising message boards. In such a community users may send messages to friend groups or selected friends. However, the same message may be received for many times by one user which causes filling up of user's message board. This requires extra work from the user to clean up the message board from duplicate messages.
Instant messaging provides a way of sending electronic messages between users substantially in real-time. What differentiates instant messaging from emails, is that instant messaging usually occurs between users sitting at the same time at their computers (i.e. face-to-face communication via computers) whereas emails are send between users and no immediate response is expected.
In conventional messaging systems received messages can be forwarded to a group of friends. In a typical situation an email client receives a message from an email server using POP3 (Post Office Protocol) protocol and then forwards the message to one or more other email clients using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) protocol.
Although SMTP protocol provides means for forwarding messages to client groups, existing systems have number of drawbacks. One problem relates to a situation where a message is forwarded to several groups, and one of the clients belongs to more than one group. In this situation the client in question receives the same message as many times as there are groups (s)he belongs to. This not only fills up the messaging application of the client, but also may annoy the client that much that (s)he may eventually block the senders of the message as the messages are marked as spam when they are repeated.
Another problem relates to information on the route and the originator of the message. Existing systems insert information on the route of the message (e.g. who received the message before it arrived to a certain client) into the message itself. The route information is written in the message and therefore it is possible to be deleted by anyone forwarding the message. The content of the message can also be altered by anyone in the forwarding chain. This makes tracking of the originator of the message, tracking the route of the message and determining the originality of the message difficult or even impossible. In addition, email is a passive medium which means that the sender does not know how many receivers actually took the time to view the link and was the message delivered at the first place.
Therefore what is needed is an alternative way for sharing web content and handling message forwarding, which takes into account the aforementioned challenges. This application is addressed to such needs.